A simple method for measuring the RF halfwave voltage of phase modulators

• Published in: 2013 5th IEEE International Symposium on Microwave, Antenna, Propagation and EMC Technologies for Wireless Communications pp. 343 - 346
• Main Authors: Xianghua Li, Chun Yang, Quanyi Ye, Yuhua Chong, Zhenghua Zhou
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-10-2013
• Subjects: Frequency measurement; Mach-Zehnder interferometer; microwave photonic link; Optical interferometry; Phase measurement; Phase modulation; phase modulator; Radio frequency; RF half-wave Voltage; Voltage measurement
• ISBN: 9781467360777; 1467360775
• DOI: 10.1109/MAPE.2013.6689817

We propose a simple and straight-forward method for measuring the RF half-wave voltage of electrooptic phase modulators based on the gain compression of phase-modulated photonic link with interferometric demodulation. By using network analyzer, we measured the RF half-wave voltage of the phase modulator with two MZI differential delay times of 486 ps and 35 ps. The measurement results approximate the typical value of the phase modulator under test. Moreover, the gain of link calculated by measured RF half-wave voltage fits well with the gain directly measured by network analyzer. Our experiment shows that this measurement method is easy to operate and has a high accuracy.